Back in '94, in the golden age of PPP Team Software, where we were spending our lunchtime creating games with the RSD Game Maker. Badman has quickly become one of our "best-known" funny platformer hero, and is starring 3 games while he was initially meant to be just a mid-level boss for Bilou's Quest. "Badman 1" was one of our "real" game produced with RSD tools, where the "terror-who-makes-errors" crosses manatthan roofs, japanese waterfalls, nazi jails and haunted mansions looking for clues about a terrorist take over to take place during the football world cup. Since my bros came up with a collection of .mod songs, it's very tempting to revive the 'best' 4 levels of the game on the Nintendo DS for an "anniversary edition" ...

There are a couple of technical issues to achieve this, mostly due to the mismatch between Nintendo console tiles (8x8 pixels) and RSD tiles (20x20). Plus, RSD game maker tileset and maps are stored in a proprietary format that isn't documented anywhere. Palettes and blocks (BBL, MBL files) aren't very sophisticated, I know how to display them on a DOS screen since '97. But .map files (levels) are still a mystery. I'll give them a reverse-engineering try this lunchtime. Let's open a hex editor and have a look ...

.maps file look to have two distinct parts, and the first one is 20,000 bytes long, which suggests a 100x100 map with 2 bytes worth of data per tile

tiles where there is no monsters have the form 0xC8yy and tiles where there is a monster have the form 0xzzyy, where zz is a relatively small number, that is unique over the map. That suggests "C8" means "no monster" and that zz is the monster's index in some other table.

The second part has 5 words (16-bit) per entry, where "0040 0000 ffff ffff 0000" seems to be a filler for "no monster here".

words 2 and 3 in that list seems to be X and Y coordinates of the monster on the map, while word #1 could be the ID of the monster to be used (that is, in the .MON file).

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somewhere, on planet Earth, there's a weird guy named Sylvain (aka. PypeBros) who loves to write programs and draw comics with a blue ball named "bilou". That's me.
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